Engineering Nanocracks Enabled Soft Micro-Wrinkles with Anomalous Strain-Resistance Effect for Underwater Electronics

Abstract

Elastic wrinkle-based sensors are generally based on a typical positive gauge-factor mechanism, which inevitably suffers from issues of high power consumption and the heat of current-typed devices. Herein, an interfacial interlocked soft-hard elastomeric wrinkle is designed for stretchable negative resistance electronics. The hard CNTs/PDMS elastomeric film is cross-linked in situ on the prestretched soft elastomer surface, allowing the formation of wrinkles after strain release. The achieved wrinkle-based sensor presents the negative resistance correlation with a strain responsive range from 0% to 90% and shows a long-term electrical stability (5000 cycles) and wide operating frequency (0.01-1.0 Hz) in the water environment. As a demonstration, the sensor is further used as wearable electronics for humans and swimming robots to sensitively monitor the underwater motion behaviors. Moreover, the sensory flexible grippers are integrated to realize real-time biometric tracking and retrieval, demonstrating the potential of underwater integrated electronics with low energy consumption and accessible circuit design.